Talk:Light Elemental, Honoly/@comment-4195306-20161030163131/@comment-24365174-20161031195652
The only situation where "avoid losing" is the different from "helps winning" is when you're completely outplayed from the start and have no chance of winning without triggersack. In that case, there's no downside to using this card on the off-chance that it would give you a glimmer of hope. In a tournament setting, double-loss is no different to you than normal-loss, and your personal tournament record doesn't really concern your opponent. Sure they might get salty, but if they play a deck that relies on 5+ attacks per turn, then they knew the risk that they would run into this card, and they don't have the right to be genuinely angry. Look at it like this: let's say you have a 95% chance of losing by means of your opponent winning and a 1% chance of losing by draw. If you play this card, your odds of losing by your opponent winning do down to 50%, and your odds of losing by draw go up to 30%. To your opponent, it's frustrating as all get-out and much salt will be spilt that day, but from your perspective, your odds just got a whole lot better. I know that that's an exaggeration and that it only applies to curbstomp matches, but the principle still applies, and in close matchups it WOULD give you an edge, because you get to control the pace of the game. But on a broader level, let's look at this situation-by-situation, in the relevent cases: Either one side or the other has their setup, both sides have it, or neither side has it. If this card comes into play in the situation where the opponent is done/almost done with their setup, but you're still working on yours, slowing the pace is exactly what you need, to give you more chances to draw what you need. Slowing the pace here gives you a distinctly greater chance of winning, so it's justified from your end to slow the game down. If this card comes into play when you're done with your setup but your opponent is not, then it doesn't really make a difference. Just play normally, at the speed that you would have otherwise, and no slowdown occurs. No deck that relies on fast-paced, lots-of-attack turns should be using this card anyway, so it stands to reason that if you put more than ten seconds of thought into building your deck, then this card can't slow yourself down, only your opponent. If this card comes into play when neither player is done with setup, then it doesn't make much of a difference either way, since neither player was going to go for a big turn or a combo play anyways, so there's no momentum for this card to kill. If this card comes into play when both players are done with setup, then it will limit your opponent and not yourself. Your own maximum attack limit should not be higher than this card's attack limit anyway, so it won't interfere with your own plays, and it will only affect your opponent. I think this is the scenario that you're most worried about for tournament slowdown, because this card doesn't actually give you any more attackers to finish your opponent with, but that shouldn't be an issue because of the way clans are generally balanced: most rushdown, multi-attack clans don't have very strong defensive draw-engines: Nova, non-Maelstrom AqF, Gear Chronicle, etc. aren't very good at taking hits; their strength comes from the fact that once they're done, the opponent has no resources to counterattack. But this card changes that by GIVING you the break in pressure that you need to counterattack, either on the next turn or the one after that. Of course, there are some exceptions, like Generation Great Nature, but calling a card a game-breaker based on a handful of specific matchups at most isn't very intuitive. And if you're worried about tournament timeout specifically as an issue with this card, then I'd call this card a net positive because assuming people actually use it, it would disincentivize battle-phase calling shenanigans where someone has to go into their deck a thousand times per turn, remove those decks from the meta. Besides, are you really preoccupied with this card's affect on tournament timeout stats ''that much ''when solitaire players exist?